By BERNARD HOLLAND

Published: June 18, 2006

THE grouping of Beethoven's last three piano sonatas makes more sense to concert programmers and record-company executives than it does to the inquiring ear. The opus numbers (109, 110, 111) are all in a row. And together the pieces fill a recital nicely or fit comfortably onto a single CD, as they do with Mitsuko Uchida's new release on the Philips label. Yet each piece is so different from the others, and each is such a tremendous earful of music in itself, that it may thrive more fully given space and isolation.

For the listener at home, there is always a finger and a button to make the necessary separations, and here there are also Ms. Uchida's fastidious technique and deep respect for Beethoven's texts. In Op. 111 she honors the composer's carefully unified tempos rather than going for the exciting surge of the moment. In Op. 110 she takes his pedal markings for what they say. The haziness of accumulating harmonies probably works better on early pianos with less power to sustain sound over long periods of time, but they are enchanting here as well.

In the three sonatas Beethoven indulges two major obsessions of his composing life: the theme and variations form -- in his hands a kind of musical fission that releases multiple, differing energies from a single source -- and his own brusque take on Baroque counterpoint. The later piano pieces often have little to do with conventional piano playing.

If deafness freed Beethoven's imagination, it may also have led him to forget what players have to go through to solve this music. Anyone looking for a honest yet deeply sophisticated approach to Beethoven -- never theatrical, never merely scholarly, and a clear window to this amazing series of sonatas -- would do well to look to Ms. Uchida's new CD. BERNARD HOLLAND